News

One of BRICpro’s latest CSR efforts is to develop a new tool which allows our staff evaluate a factory’s CSR standards in one go and update factory data with each visit. This contributes a whole lot to our overall goal of improving working conditions and puts a framework around the dialogue with factory managers.

All our factory partners do fulfill the BRICpro minimum standards. However, these regard only the most basic of human rights and safety standards. We regularly visit every manufacturer to check up on production and product quality. The essence of what BRICpro represents, however, is to integrate this routine with a consistent effort to enhance safety and well-being at the factories.

This is undoubtedly a new approach in the outsourcing industry and requires us to develop our own means. In order to follow through with the plan of making factories a decent work place, we develop the social audit tool in line with UN Global Compact and ILOstandards.

Ever since the beginning, BRICpro has been evaluating all factories on the basis of their CSR efforts, working environment and most importantly, their eagerness to improve. This has taken tremendous qualitative means of interviewing, observation and hands-on optimizations. We gained invaluable knowledge from these experiences during the last three years and aim to turn that into a user friendly digital tool that is constantly updated and improved in order to ensure ethical production conditions – and products.

What we did so far

1 Our CSR team has worked out a practical tool derived largely from the United Nations consensus on matters of Labor and Human Rights. There are social audit tools and many different official standards which are there to make sourcing and manufacturing an easier business. In order to really see results while minimizing risks in the process, however, we had to develop our own tool that comprises all relevant information for our clients and factory partners specifically. The strength is that the tool can be customized across industries and countries. At the same time it evaluates the specific risks our clients face in outsourcing as well as tracking requirements for material, machinery, air quality and so on.

2 The entire BRICpro team has participated in a workshop about the details and underlying assumptions of the tool. Our aim is to make every BRICpro employee an expert in factory CSR – regardless of their backgrounds.

3 Our creative director is testing the prototype for health and safety standards at the factories in Indonesia, India and China at this very moment.

We learn new things with every factory visit, which is why this tool will always keep developing. Eventually, factory profiles will be connected directly to the data from the audits. In this way the tool allows us and our customers to track how each factory is progressing in terms of CSR.